The Right Way and the Wrong Way

I do some writing for clients once and again. Mostly rewrites, as I've found my particular strengths lie in coming up with overlying concepts and dialogue. A good friend once said to me, "Mark, you have great ideas, you just never DO anything with them." He's right, and I'm working on it. Hopefully this blog will help me sharpen my writing chops and I'll get better at writing stories instead of scenes. Lots of my friends from high school and college are professional writers for print and screen and I have to tip my hat to them, because writing cohesively is hard. I had an accidental lesson in Screenwriting 101 over the weekend when I watched Red Letter Media's complete and utter evisceration of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on YouTube. It's a bit of an investment time wise at an hour and ten minutes, but it stands out as an extremely well thought out piece on the power of concise and streamlined writing. The gist of it basically, is that we have no reason to care about any of the characters in Phantom Menace, and this apathy leads to disinterest in the film as a whole. Then tonight I watched Pixar's Up, and was shown the complete opposite. Within the opening 15 minutes we meet our protagaonist Carl as a young man and see him meet the woman who will become his wife, Ellie. Then WITHOUT ANY DIALOGUE AT ALL, we see them start their life together, share their joy and pain, and feel Carl's loss so that by the time we meet Carl in the present day, we feel for him and completely sympathize with him and his story. It's interesting because both films rely so heavily on computer animation to tell their stories, but the one that was 100% computer animated had a stronger story with much better character development. And a large portion of the characters in Phantom Menace are ones we already know in some form and have emotional attachments to, or should anyway. Pixar's streak continues. Lucas always has merchandising.